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Kiran Aditham is a Business Management grad from the University of Central Florida, Aditham earned his stripes as a freelance writer in music/arts publishing.

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Adding Intellectual to Contextual: Vibrant Media Brightens the Lines of Contextual Targeting

Written on
Jun 16, 2006 
Author
Kiran Aditham  |
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Adding Intellectual to Contextual: Vibrant Media Brightens the Lines of Contextual Targeting

A: Are you surprised nobody’s really touching on this technology?

D: I think back in 2001, we were, when we came here from London. We thought this was the only way that advertising should be; there should be this contextual relevancy for the advertiser and for the user. Advertising works really well if it’s relevant to the user. Users like advertising if it’s targeted specifically to them. If I’m looking for an MP3 player, and there’s some iPod advertising, I’m going to be taking interest in the advertising. So that’s the whole purpose of contextual advertising: it’s placed in a relevant position for the user.

It really is about the user. User interest and user-initiated advertising is what we’re all about. If the user is interacting with the advertising, then the advertiser is going to get the best possible impact for the spend.

A: Do you feel that most advertising, from any perspective, is one-sided so to speak?

D: Yeah, I think it is. But I think our new ad unit is at the cutting edge of contextual advertising and user-initiated advertising. I think we’ll see more and more of this as time goes on, because users are perhaps skipping through TV commercials with DVRs. So advertisers need to know users are engaging with their adverts. And what better way to know that they’re engaging than through user-initiated advertising?

A: What are the challenges that this technology faces in terms of breaching the marketplace?

Anna: I think one of the things that we really focused on in our initial user studies is the idea that if you asked people if they liked more advertising, usually a person would say no. They don’t really like more advertising. But if you asked them that if they liked this kind of advertising as opposed to this kind and this kind, it’s really interesting to watch their opinions change.

So the idea that a user–even myself being one–can see less advertising and only see it when it’s relevant to me, is an education. But it’s something that our retention rate with the places that we run our media campaigns on publisher sites, etc., really shows the acceptance of it.

We’ve offered disable switches to disable IntelliTXT, and a very, very minute number of people actually have.

D:: I think another thing to add to it is that according to research, on my way from waking up this morning, going into work and by the end of day, I will have seen 1,000 adverts. And most of those adverts are adverts I haven’t chosen to be targeted with—whether it be in a taxi, on a billboard, turning on the TV or the radio. So here’s a form of advertising, with IntelliTXT, that I’m choosing to see. I’m choosing to interact with it, and I’m choosing then whether I want to click through and find out more information about the advertiser.

Anna: I think you’ll be seeing more and more about this type of advertising, especially coming from Vibrant Media, the idea that there can be a relevant trigger out there without showing the actual ad.

A: Yeah, it’s not as intrusive, and a bit more subtle than the normal online advertising.

Anna: That’s the goal. The double-underlines was what we found to be having to make the least amount of modifications to a website, and always be able to have it standard so that the user knows what it is.

A: Background-wise Doug, how did you get involved with the arena?

D: I came from an online background, and originally started off with Compuserve—when you had a number at Compuserve.com. Before that, I was in the publishing background. But I could see back in 1997 that there was a lot of opportunity within the Internet area. I started at Compuserve, then AOL Europe. AOL was a great ground to understand advertising, because there was so many billions of impressions going through that service back then. So that gave a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t in online advertising. I was the head of ecommerce.

A: Is there a major difference in ecommerce activity in Europe versus the US?

Europe is a little behind the curve, but pretty much the same. AOL was one of the brands in Europe that was so strong, because it was so dominant in the US. It took a lot of the learning from the US to the European marketplace. I think, depending on which market, the UK was probably about 6 months behind the US marketplace. This was great to take some of the learning from some of the multi-million dollar advertising deals into the European marketplace. I think Europe was less impacted than the US was when everything went bang in 2000.

But I think where we’re at now, some of the stats that we’re getting in terms of scale is what really excites us. Having done this for six years, now that we have a capacity to deliver 200 million user-initiated commercials in one month to over 65 million unique users, I think we now have that kind of scale that television advertisers are looking for. Now, there are a lot of online properties that can offer mass reach.

A: What are the clients who have jumped on to IntelliTXT?

Sure, we’re working with Warner Brothers, with Ubisoft, with Nike. We already have a lot of people running ads.

Anna: Print campaign starts later in the summer, the thought leadership case studies.

D: It’s down to the quality of our technology team as well, that they’ve been able to analyze 500 billion words per month, and then to be able to highlight 4 billion of them. It’s quite an undertaking to find relevancy and find the best possible advert to link to the most relevant content.

Anna: A lot of times with advertisers, we focus on creative services, media planning and buying, and helping to develop the words and all the things to make it easier for the advertiser. But I think the one thing that we don’t always highlight is the technology, innovation and how long we’ve been doing this for that allows us to have such an insanely large distribution.





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